Stay informed
How the Montreal Canadiens Helped Viggo Mortensen Find Himself
American actor Viggo Mortensen might well be the Montreal Canadiens’ most recognizable fan. Best known for playing Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, he’s often spotted wearing a Habs jersey at film events around the world. He caused a stir in Toronto in 2012 by unfurling a giant Canadiens flag as he picked up his Best Supporting Actor Genie Award for his role as Sigmund Freud in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method.
“I thank David Cronenberg, but I dedicate this award to the Montreal Canadiens. We’ll be back next year with a vengeance,” Mortensen told a crowd that undoubtedly included way more Toronto Maple Leafs fans than Canadiens supporters.
Today, the Habs are in the second round of the playoffs, facing off against the Buffalo Sabres. Montreal is now the only Canadian team left in the hunt for the Stanley Cup. A few days back, Prime Minister Mark Carney called the Habs “Canada’s team,” and I think he’s right. In this new Donald Trump–inspired era of Canadian nationalism, I believe most across the country are pulling for the Canadiens against their American opponents.
Mortensen knows something about that cross-border pull. His own love for the Habs stretches back to a turning point in his life, when he was feeling a little bit lost as he entered his teenage years. He’d just moved with his family to Watertown, New York, not far from the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario, some forty kilometres south of the Thousand Islands. Mortensen had been born in New York City before spending most of the first eleven years of his life in Argentina. When his parents divorced, his mother brought her three sons back to her roots in upstate New York.
Young Mortensen hadn’t known what to make of his new surroundings at first. No one spoke Spanish. He felt as if he was at the end of the world, far from the Argentina he knew and loved. Perhaps worst of all, he felt worlds apart from San Lorenzo de Almagro, the Buenos Aires soccer club he’d rooted for throughout his childhood.
Mortensen looked back on those years over the course of a long conversation I had with him at his Madrid apartment. “We had left Argentina where I was a fan of a football team called San Lorenzo, which had the colours blue and red and very passionate fans. And I kind of lost contact with all that because, you know, there wasn’t internet and all that back then. Well, one day, I was at my grandparents’ house and watching colour TV, the first colour TV that I’d seen, and there was a hockey game, the Canadiens playing. I don’t know who they were playing against. I wish I could remember. But I was watching. I said, ‘What are they doing? They’re going really fast . . .’ I was trying to understand what it was.
“It wasn’t eleven against eleven. But there was something about it that reminded me of football in a way. There was something about the fans. I could see the colours which were similar to San Lorenzo colours, you know. The bleu, blanc, rouge instead of the red and blue of San Lorenzo. But the fans were very passionate, excited. And there was something about it that reminded me of something I’d lost contact with.
“Then I saw more games because they showed the Canadiens a lot because they were good at the time.” The timing couldn’t have been better. The club was on the cusp of its glory years, going on to win six Stanley Cups in the ’70s.
One of the most interesting and surprising aspects of Mortensen’s love for the Habs is that San Lorenzo and the Canadiens have a great deal in common, aside from their colours. First, both clubs were formed within a tight-knit community at the start of the twentieth century: San Lorenzo was founded in 1908 by young men who would play soccer together on the streets of the Almagro neighbourhood of Buenos Aires. And both clubs produced, at various stages of their history, legendary teams with deep working-class roots: San Lorenzo players were nicknamed the carasucias (dirty faces) in the 1960s due to their bad-boy antics on and off the pitch.
“Canadiens fans and San Lorenzo fans have a lot in common,” says Mortensen, “especially in the joy they show. But it was more than that. Players like Lafleur, Cournoyer, Lapointe, and Béliveau were like San Lorenzo icons Narciso Doval, Héctor Veira, and Héctor Scotta. And Ken Dryden, the goalie performing heroics, was the equivalent of Carlos ‘Batman’ Buttice.”
Mortensen, who speaks flawless French, learned the language of Molière—or perhaps we should say the language of Lafleur—by listening to Canadiens games on Radio-Canada. It’s not much of a stretch to say that legendary Radio-Canada play-by-play broadcaster René Lecavalier taught him French!
“When I was thirteen or fourteen, I began listening to conversations on the radio, in French and English. Some of the French words were like the Spanish ones I knew. And, in some ways, French began to replace Spanish, the language I’d lost a little since no one around Watertown spoke it.”
Even from Madrid, Mortensen tries his best to follow his beloved Canadiens, sometimes getting up in the middle of the night to catch the odd game. He’s well aware of what Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield, and Juraj Slafkovský are up to on a daily basis. In other words, Mortensen’s Habs fandom hasn’t faded in the least since that moment all those years ago when he first saw the team in action.
“The Canadiens are something I love, a childhood passion of mine. They’re important to me. The Habs helped me with the transition between my life in Argentina and the United States.”
Years later, Mortensen still has the faith, even though the last time Montreal won the championship goes all the way back to 1993. “It’s tough, but if you’re a real fan . . . I learned that with San Lorenzo: you have to suffer. And I think that Habs fans and San Lorenzo fans never lose hope. We remember our past, and we’re optimistic about the future. Always. There’s always another game.”
Mortensen also told me how he filmed the Lord of the Rings movies while sometimes wearing a Habs T-shirt underneath his armour! “But I wore a San Lorenzo T-shirt too!” he said, with a laugh. “As I did on other shoots. I don’t know. I think it makes me stronger; it gives me motivation. It’s a superstition, I suppose, but it works!”
When he began rooting for the Canadiens, young Mortensen was unaware of the team’s social and political significance. It was later that he learned—reading about Maurice Richard and the 1955 riot—about the club’s important role in Quebec’s modern history. Part of the club’s heritage, he discovered, comes from an “us against them” mentality that’s writ large not only in the history of the Habs but also in the history of Quebec and the rest of Canada.
“I remember, I was in Toronto preparing to work on a movie for David Cronenberg, the first one I did with him [A History of Violence]. It would have been 2004. And they were playing the World Cup of Hockey, and I saw that Canada was playing against—I don’t know, I think it was an Eastern European team . . . So I ran down to see it. I got a ticket and went in.
“And I was wearing a Montreal Canadiens sweater. You know, I’m going to a hockey game. I sat down, and I got some really kinda severe looks. And eventually, sometime during the second period, a guy who had maybe a few too many beers turned around and said . . . I won’t say exactly the words he used but, ‘What the hell are you doing wearing that here?’ And I said, ‘What do you mean? It’s Canadian, it’s a Canadian hockey team. I’m wearing a Canadiens sweater, and there are a couple of guys from my team on the national team. They’re playing on the ice right now, and I’m hoping they win.’ And he goes, ‘That’s not Canada.’”
When the Habs became a part of Mortensen’s life in the 1970s, he felt like an outsider in the United States and quickly realized he had an affinity with the Montreal Canadiens since, as a Quebec-based club, the Habs were also outsiders in Canada.
“I was born in the United States, but I grew up in Argentina. Because of my childhood and since I spoke Spanish, I was always unlike the other boys, even though I wanted to be just like them. And so, I found a personal connection in the difference between Quebecers and Canadians, between the Montreal Canadiens and the other teams. Even though I wasn’t born in Quebec, part of me feels like a Quebecer when I watch a Canadiens game. And being in Montreal makes me happy. It’s right up there with being in Buenos Aires.”
Mortensen loves the Habs, but most of all, he loves the team of his teenage years, the group who won cup after cup with remarkable ease all through the 1970s. And if there’s one player who epitomizes those glory years more than any other, that player is, of course, Guy Lafleur. “He was fantastic! Elegant, skillful, quick. He was a very intelligent playmaker. Not unlike Narciso Doval at San Lorenzo. They even look a little alike with their long blond hair. The ‘Démon blond!’ To a boy like me, he was a hero, a phenomenal player.”
And that explains why one of Mortensen’s greatest nights as a Habs fan came on December 4, 2009, when he took to the ice as part of the club’s centenary celebrations to introduce Guy Lafleur to a sold-out Bell Centre. Before addressing the crowd, Mortensen took off his sports jacket to reveal a Canadiens jersey bearing Lafleur’s name and number.
“Bonsoir, I’m from across the river, and I’m very happy they let me through customs this afternoon,” he said in a mix of English and French. “And I’m very happy. This is amazing. Standing with all these people—this is a one-time thing. Joyeux anniversaire à tous. I started following the Canadiens during the golden age of the ’70s. And it is my great honour to introduce to you the player from that era who, for me, was the most elegant, the most dangerous . . .”
Which is when the crowd began to chant, “GUY! GUY! GUY!”
“And with all due respect to his wonderful teammates, he was the greatest. The man who will always be my idol. Mesdames et messieurs, l’éternel numéro dix, le Démon blond, Guy Lafleur!”
Talking about that moment more than a decade later, Mortensen still gets very emotional looking back on it.
“December 4 was like a dream come true for me. I felt at peace at the Bell Centre, like I was home. It was beautiful. It was perfect. Lafleur seemed so kind and intelligent, even though I can’t honestly say I got to know him. Still, I reached out and hugged him on the ice in Montreal. What more can you ask for? What more can you dream of?”
Two heroes—“The Flower” and Aragorn—meeting on centre ice in Montreal. Talk about a Hollywood ending.
This excerpt from Habs Nation: A People’s History of the Montreal Canadiens by Brendan Kelley is reproduced with the permission of Baraka Books Inc.
The post How the Montreal Canadiens Helped Viggo Mortensen Find Himself first appeared on The Walrus.
Comments
Be the first to comment